Brighton Park Community Center by Elias Reschly, Fernando Cisneros, and Daniel Morales
Our submission responds to the call to transform a vacant lot by addressing several concerning issues in our community. According to https://www.cmap.illinois.gov, the median income is $38,673 compared to the citywide median which is $50,434. Also, 43.6% of people don't have a high school diploma versus citywide which is 16.9%. Furthermore, violence, in general, is a serious issue that this community is facing. We would also want to change the reputation of our community. One of the first things that show up when you search up Brighton Park is its shootings and crime statistics. This facility would strive to get children and young adults off streets, offer several programs during and after the school year, provide a facility with resources for families with low income, create a new park with several sports fields, and create a greenhouse that would also be used to provide a food pantry for the less fortunate people in our community. Another thing we want to encourage is a healthy lifestyle through exercise and nutrition classes. With these several resources and positive influential programs, we believe that our submission would extremely benefit our neighborhood in a variety of aspects.
Our primary objective for this submission is to create a secure, safe, and welcoming space where people of all ages can enjoy their time and learn while not being exposed to, influenced, and worried by violence. Violence has been a reoccurring issue throughout our community. Often times, many of these barbaric acts and incidents overshadow all of the great things that occur in our neighborhood. We also want to address other issues in our community such as low income, low percentages of people with a high school diploma, and not having a space to work where you can do so untroubled. The way we wanted to address each problem is with an area within the lot such as a school for adults, an area for working by yourself and in groups and hanging out, and an area encouraging a healthy lifestyle. Additionally, this project would add sidewalks to the western and eastern edges of the project, sidewalks that are currently not in place. We would also like to see a change in the environment, with the incentive that factories overwhelm the area where many kids travel near, your environment plays a key role in shaping you. This submission would help enhance the neighborhood and community by striving to improve a sense of unity and safety between neighbors, friends, family and their surroundings.
We have collectively decided to utilize SketchUp and Unity3D to accurately represent our submission. SketchUp is a 3D software modeling program and Unity3D is a game engine that can realistically render the model we have. We are familiar and comfortable using these two programs; we felt that by using these programs we could give an accurate and vivid representation of how our submission would appear and interact with the surrounding area. We chose SketchUp as the software to model and create the structure of our submission because it is very user-friendly and easy to learn. This simplicity saved us numerous hours, which in turn allowed for more time to meticulously and conscientiously plan our vision. Likewise, we chose to make use of the Unity3D game engine for renderings because of the plainness and experience we already have. Furthermore, by rendering the model on Unity3D, we could subsequently make use of the game engine and provide accurately to scale 3D renders of the project.
